Aunt Mary Smith was Mary Frazier’s mother’s younger half-sister. She was born on Saturday, April 13, 1867, to Stephen McCormick and his second wife Charlotte Burgett. On Christmas Eve, 1891, she married Stonewall Jackson Smith. They show up in the 1900 federal census as renting at 357 Mansur Street, Ward 4, in Chillicothe. Jack was a drayman. They had no children of their own, but in 1910, 15 year-old nephew Herbert Brooks McCormick was living with them (Brooks’ parents, Henry Edward and Sallie Sharp McCormick died in 1908 and 1904, respectively). In 1920, Jack and Mary were living at 904 Hogan Street, Ward 4, Chillicothe. Jack died on July 1, 1929, and Mary died of pneumonia on November 11, 1930. She shows up in the census one more time as a widow living at 304 Mansur in Chillicothe.

It has always been a struggle to discern where Mary’s father was born, and Mary doesn’t help the matter at all. She gives slippery answers to the census man, saying in one decade that Stephen was born in Indiana, and another one, she says Alabama. Stephen himself reported Tennessee in 1860, Alabama in 1870, and Virginia in 1880.